| PackageDescription | The AST library provides a comprehensive range of facilities for attaching
world coordinate systems to astronomical data, for retrieving and interpreting
that information and for generating graphical output based on it. It's main
selling points are:
* Ease of use.
* Facilities for generating plots of generalized non-linear, potentially
discontinuous 2-D or 3-D coordinate systems, with detailed control of the
appearance of the plot.
* Facilities for converting transparently between different coordinate
systems, including a wide range of celestial, spectral and time coordinate
systems.
* Facilities for searching a general collection of connected coordinate
systems for a coordinate system with any given set of characteristics.
* Allows code for handling WCS information to be written in a general way
without regard to the specific nature of the coordinate systems being
handled (i.e. whether they represent sky positions, spectral positions,
focal plane positions, pixel positions, etc).
* Flexible system for saving and retrieving WCS information, including (but
not limited to) a range of different popular FITS descriptions.
* Written in C but has interfaces for C, Fortran, Java (via JNI), Perl, and
UNIX shell.
* Extensive documentation. |